Donald Trump is sacrificing global food security to play host at his own property.
I read Michael Jacobs’s column in the Guardian on the bench Tuesday night, with the Adams County Times-Reporter folded underneath it, and what stopped me was the arithmetic. Britain takes the presidency of the G20 next year, and the summit is staged in Manchester in the autumn. For twelve months the prime minister, Andy Burnham, sets the agenda: he picks the priorities, he writes the text, and the other nineteen leaders, plus the European Union and the African Union, show up and argue about it. The G20 itself is a thin thing. No headquarters. No staff. No standing website. If you want to know what the world’s largest economies have agreed over the past twenty years you have to dig through unofficial pages kept up by academics at the University of Toronto. Most years its summits produce a communiqué that commits nobody to anything they were not already planning to do.
The last time Britain held the chair, in 2009, it worked. The financial system was coming apart. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said publicly that “none of us has a plan.” Barack Obama answered: “Gordon has a plan.” He did. Gordon Brown got a $5 trillion fiscal stimulus out of the group, expanded IMF lending to developing countries, and built the Financial Stability Board, still the only standing body anywhere for coordinating financial regulation. One year, one chair, real machinery. That is the fact everything below turns on.
Jacobs argues Burnham should use the chair the same way, on four things: a global treaty process on artificial intelligence; food security, with the incoming “supersized” El Niño colliding with the climate crisis, worn-out soils, and the diesel and fertiliser costs pushed up by the war in the Middle East; coordinated climate-resilience money for the countries getting hit hardest; and debt restructuring for low- and middle-income countries whose debt has gone unsustainable through no fault of their own. Our own reporting has Burnham weighing where Britain stands between Washington, Beijing and Brussels, which is the only question a country his size can actually answer.
Here is why this lands in Adams County.
The summit before Britain’s, this December, is being held at one of Donald Trump’s own properties near Miami. Last year he boycotted the G20 summit altogether. The Guardian’s Jacobs expects the December gathering to be “a show of personal and US power and very little attempt to achieve anything by way of multilateral cooperation.” That is his projection of a record we already have, not a guess about the weather. And the record around here is what I want to write down.
The standard I use on any deal, big or small, is the one this county already knows: does it reach the member? Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative is headquartered in Friendship, the largest rural electric co-op in Wisconsin. It exists because in 1936 the government decided the market would never run wire out to a place like this, and it ran the wire anyway, through member-owned cooperatives, on twenty-five-year loans at three percent. The poles along the section-line road behind my property are older than I am. The shop runs on that decision. Wendell Berry has written the agrarian version of this more times than I have read it: the economy of a place is its membership, who is in it, who is fed by it, who gets to fix what they own, and extraction takes the membership first and the numbers afterward. A communiqué is not a pole in the ground. But the money it unlocks or strangles is.
This county also knows what a big plan that never reaches the ground looks like. In 1901 they organized the Leola Drainage District, dug forty miles of ditch across fifteen thousand acres of black peat, and spent a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars. By 1907 the district was broke, and the drained peat was smoldering for months. A plan that stops at the district line is a plan for somebody else.
Start with food, because that is the one that lands on a kitchen table. Jacobs has the mechanism right. A super-sized El Niño is not arriving into a healthy system: soils worn thin, diesel and fertiliser prices pushed up by a war, yields falling and prices rising, with the first increase absorbed by the people who can least absorb it. But the price sheet does not stop at a border. Wisconsin has lost dairy farms faster than the country as a whole, 15,366 of them between 1997 and 2022, per the University of Wisconsin Extension’s census work, and the state’s licensed dairy herd count fell from 7,292 herds on January 1, 2020 to 6,533 two years later, per DATCP. A 2022 analysis the Wisconsin Examiner reported put the average cost of producing milk at $25.80 per hundredweight against an average sales price of $18.57 over the preceding fifteen years. The typical small dairy was losing money on every can it shipped. Now add a fertilizer bill set by a war and a diesel price set by a week of summit theater. In this county that shows up twice in the same week: in the feed bill at the barn and in the cart at the grocery store.
Debt is the priority people hear and file under somebody else’s problem. It is a Wisconsin problem with a Wisconsin address. When a low-income country’s debt service swallows its budget, it stops buying, and what it stops buying is often American dairy and soybeans. The USDA had American agricultural exports at $175 billion in 2023, eleven percent below the year before. We have run this experiment already. When the soybean market to China fell apart in 2018 and 2019, the government sent farmers checks under the Market Facilitation Program. Last December it was $12 billion in “bridge payments,” as the Wisconsin Examiner and Wisconsin Public Radio reported. That is what a food-security failure looks like from a farm gate: a check standing in for a market. A working debt framework abroad is not charity. It is demand for what this state grows.
Climate resilience is where my own notebook comes in. The ice-out date on Lake Petenwell, twelve years of it written down, has moved eleven days earlier since I started. The syrup run starts sooner and quits sooner. The mosquitoes are in the county a month before they used to be. The DNR’s long records say the same thing the ice tells me. This county also remembers what fire does here: the record puts the 2005 Cottonville fire at 3,410 acres and thirty homes in Big Flats. Adaptation is not a coastal problem. It is a well-and-crop-and-line problem, and the money for it is already on the books and already under attack. The Inflation Reduction Act put roughly $19.5 billion into farm conservation, and by the end of fiscal 2024 only about twenty-seven percent had been allocated, with EQIP historically rejecting more than a hundred thousand farmer applications a year. The 2024 House Agriculture Committee farm bill, written under Chairman G.T. Thompson, proposed rescinding $12.3 billion of the remaining conservation money. And the New ERA program, about $9.7 billion in loans and grants to rural electric cooperatives, made its first selections in 2024, with Dairyland Power Cooperative, the generation and transmission co-op that serves much of central Wisconsin, on the list. That is the closest thing this county gets to a G20 outcome: line upgrades, substation work, the difference between a grid that rides out a July and one that doesn’t. The demand on our own delegation is not complicated. Defend the money that is committed. Do not let a farm bill written for somebody else’s district claw back what a co-op in Friendship is counting on.
Artificial intelligence sounds like the least local of the four until you notice who prices the tools that run a school district. Sara’s district signed a license this fall for a reading program that runs on a model I can’t inspect and she can’t fix. The county buys software the same way, through a vendor contract nobody here has leverage over. The same question is already in the courts: who holds the keys to the machine, and who gets to fix it. Deere settled a repair antitrust class action for $99 million this spring, and the federal trade case against the company is still open. Britain writing a global standard on testing, transparency and inspection, now, while Washington will not sign, is not distant diplomacy. It is the only mechanism in reach that decides whether the machine in a kid’s classroom or in a farmer’s cab comes with a key. Our delegation should be in the room where that standard gets drafted instead of reading about it afterward.
Jacobs suggests Burnham might call his year “national security through international cooperation.” Around here that phrase usually means a wall or a weapon. What actually keeps this county fed is fertilizer, diesel, export markets, and a grid that stays up in a July. If the phrase can be made to mean those four things, it is worth more than it sounds.
The G20 will not fix Adams County. But the money it coordinates, or refuses to, ends up in farm bills and co-op loans and school-district vendor contracts that our own members of Congress vote on anyway. Burnham gets a chair for a year. Our readers get a vote, and the votes on these four mechanisms are coming whether the summit meets or not. Between now and then, every one of our representatives will claim to be for the farmer and the family and the grid. Ask them which way they are voting on the conservation money, the New ERA loans, and the export markets, and make them answer before the communiqué, not after.
Mike is eight. Quinn is five. They will inherit whatever this year decides about the money that reaches a place like this one. What I want them to inherit is a county that still has a county: poles standing, a milk check that covers the feed bill, a school with software somebody can inspect. That is what the wire was for. That is what the vote is for. The test is the same in Manchester and in Friendship, and it has never been complicated. Does the deal reach the ground?